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We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.

I don't know what they think, but I am not buying a Go until hell freezes. I will stick to UMDs until they run out. By then, if I have to buy another portable, it will be something else for sure. A nintendo DSI maybe.

I read ars review [arstechnica.com] on the psp go and it is simply unbelievable what they have done. They just want to fuck the customer and profit. I didn't pirated any PSP game and will not pay for other people mistakes

Reading that review makes me want to dust-off my old Atari, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis consoles, and relive the days when gaming was FUN rather than a chore. The PSP Go sounds like a royal piece of shit, especially the part where you have to waste 2-3 hours downloading games.

Reading that review makes me want to dust-off my old Atari, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis consoles, and relive the days when gaming was FUN rather than a chore. The PSP Go sounds like a royal piece of shit, especially the part where you have to waste 2-3 hours downloading games.

Yeah, 802.11b is inexcusable for a device like this in the present day...

Presumably, unless each UMD has a unique serial number, and the hypothetical UMD-to-PSP Go converter phones it home, there would be no way for Sony to keep a given UMD disk from being turned into N copies, all blessed by Sony.

And, even if there are unique serial numbers, and they could make that work, any official mechanism that produces blessed copies of legacy applications would presumably be a logical target for attackers.

And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.

Presumably, unless each UMD has a unique serial number, and the hypothetical UMD-to-PSP Go converter phones it home, there would be no way for Sony to keep a given UMD disk from being turned into N copies, all blessed by Sony.

What about accepting reality that pirates already enjoy the premium service - and providing legit customers with the something similar??

Or Sony felt compelled to feed the pirates with new and more justifications to do what they did before?

And/or because Sony's secret bylaws compel them to treat their customers with precisely equal amounts of hatred and contempt at all times.

That's more like it.

Sony and Nintendo are quite similar that they pretty much always dismiss their own customers. That's why people are so divided: they either love it or hate it. It feels like their R&Ds live and work in some sort of isolated underground lab where novelties like internet and forums are not available. And all of customer feedback is substituted with directives and memos from upper management. Well, at least Nintendo has the luminary Miyamoto (who is already "upper management") and his games have some loyal fans.

With hard copy disc based games you can sell them on to friends or a shop once you're done. A bit more difficult with a download - people will just want it for free and what shop will buy a memory stick off you that may or may not work and may or may not have viruses etc embedded on it?

I think you really hit the nail on the head here. There is a pretty big market for reselling used games. With the PSP Go, not only are you restricted from reselling your used games but you are also locked into purchasing them from Sony's download service.

Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] published an excellent review on the PSP Go and why you should just stick with the standard PSP 3000.

The PSP Go reminds me of another frak-up by an earlier company called Commodore. They had the extremely-popular Amiga 500, then released a 600 that was supposed to be an upgrade, but was actually less functional (no keypad, not backwards-compatible with old games, and not expandable). According to their chief engineer Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be $50-$60 cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500." The Managing Director of Commodore UK, David Pleasance, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up."

I suspect ten years from now we'll see Sony engineers saying the PSP GO started as a good idea, but due to poor management and bad decisions, became a complete and utter screw-up, and about $100 more expensive than it was meant to be.

Agreed. I think a lot of people are missing that being able to cut out the multi-billion-dollar used game market is a lot more important to Sony than reducing piracy of music- and a lot more ominous for the user. Its the ultimate lock-in, like if Apple were to decide one day to force iTunes users to only be able to listen/sync to music purchased from iTMS. Sony here is giving a giant middle finger to the first-sale doctrine.

>>>Sony here is giving a giant middle finger to the first-sale doctrine.

And we the customers are giving a giant middle finger back, as we close our wallets and refuse to buy any more games. I'm not going to buy anything that I can't later say, "Well I'm tired of that game," and sell it to someone else. I'll just keep playing my older Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Playstation consoles. Frak Sony, frak RIAA, and frak e-books sellers.

I've a cracked PSP & can honestly say I've never pirated a single PSP UMD game. I do however have emulators & ROMs on it for every NES, SNES, Gameboy, SMS & Genesis game I've ever owned. As well as all of my PS1 games which run natively after a little tweaking. I also have PSP versions of Tyrian, Quake & a E-Book reader on there.

You're getting screwed by your favorite shop. I bought my 8 GiB Memory Stick at Wal-Mart for $32. Here is a hint, look in the camera department & not the games department. Still quite a bit more then an equivalent SD card though.

There is only one reason I won't buy a Sony camera -- I was an XCP victim. You would have to be a complete and utter moron to buy anything digital from a company with a history of rooting their own customers' computers.

I can't figure out how Sony is still in business, are there that many stupid people in the world who will buy froma company that has shown nothing but contempt for their customers? No wonder the economy collapsed. If a company like Sony ca

Because compact flash is essentially the IDE interface... That's why it is preferable over pretty much anything. Alas, as you say: it lost, mainly due because of pyhsical size. In the beginning the price difference between SD and CF wasn't all that apparent.

Compact Flash is similarly much more expensive than SD. I have no idea why Canon stuck to CF for their EOS 400D camera, years after SD "won" the format war (for phones/cameras etc).

Personally I have no idea why SD "won" the format war to begin with. I loved the fact that all I needed was a simple adapter and I could use my CF card on any laptop under any OS without drivers. I guess smaller automatically equals better these days. Who cares if you need to use a pair of tweezers to remove the memory card from your device.....

Cost cut = Price cut.It takes quite a bit of hardware to implement the IDE interface. And each card must have this hardware. Moving the hardware to the reader device allows you to pay its price once for many cards.

As for size, I have 12 MicroSD cards here, with me, in a 4x2x1cm box, and find handling them more comfortable than carrying and handling 12 CF cards would be.

What the author here is trying to convey is that it is cynically [reference.com] funny (funny to those who believe in human selfishness) that the two are correlated. Of course that does not equal causation [wikipedia.org], but now I'm just getting off topic (PS: I love the lemon graph [wikipedia.org] at the top, I toss it in slide shows randomly to see if anyone is

You are supposed to read into it. The intention was to point out that Sony's attempt to increase sales by reducing the price of 1 item, correlated with reduced sales of another item. By referring to it as irony, there is an implied causation as well as correlation.

The irony being Sonys efforts had an opposite in meaning effect for them.

That holds up with your definition as well - just have to read backwards from the irony, rather than imply a mistake was made when it isn't spelled out for you.

Sure it is. You would expect someone referencing the song to know who sings/wrote it. In this case, they did not. There is a difference between what one would expect and what actually happened. That IS dramatic/situational irony.

You not knowing that is also situationally ironic, because when complaining about whether or not something is ironic, you should know the various accepted definitions of irony and have a grasp of what situations can fulfill those definitions. In this case, you did not, which le

Sony can only blame itself for the failure of UMD movies. When the PSP first came out I was looking forward to having portable movies, but they cost significantly more than DVD's even though they were lower quality and could only be viewed on one device (the PSP 1000 had no video out), it was no wonder they didn't sell.

I have never bought a UMD movie, nor am I interested in watching a movie on a small screen. One of the kids bought one at a pawnshop once, and his comment on the viewing experience was "lame."

My entire concern here is that my family has a large number of games on the format (we have five people, and five PSPs -- many games we have 2 or more copies of so we can play machine to machine -- Tekken, race games, etc.), and the new machine won't play them. At all. As in we supported Sony and the game manufactur

You really bought a backup PS3 just so you could keep playing PS2 games?

How often do you even care about playing a PS2 game?I know since I got current-gen systems I've barely ever looked back. I think I played StarWars Battlefront once. Besides which, emulation is coming along well in the form of PCSX2. I find it almost unbelievable you would bother to spend all that money on a redundant PS3, or a whole new set of PSPs.

You really bought a backup PS3 just so you could keep playing PS2 games?

How often do you even care about playing a PS2 game?I know since I got current-gen systems I've barely ever looked back. I think I played StarWars Battlefront once. Besides which, emulation is coming along well in the form of PCSX2. I find it almost unbelievable you would bother to spend all that money on a redundant PS3, or a whole new set of PSPs.

Many people (including you apparently) don't get the fact that the PSPGo is not meant to be a replacement for the PSP-3000. The UMD-friendly PSP will still be available after the PSPGo's launch, so the comparison with the PS3 is not really relevant

Nintendo said, repeatably, the DS was not a replacement for the GBA, they will exist concurrently and continue to have game developed on them. One year later, the GBA was dead.
I can see Sony completely killing the "old" PSP model in favor of the 100% Sony controlled PSP Go, even if it is an utter failure.
They will take my PSP-2001 from my old dead hands.

I have probably every interesting movie that came out on UMD that was interesting - most purchased at $5 or less (yay firesales!).

I also own 3 PSPs (I use a 1k, my kid and my wife a 2k)

The problem I have with the go is still much the same as your problem - with over 40 games and 30 some movies on UMD, I have no interest in a new device that makes me as a customer re-re-buy all of that.Screw that - I'll be buying another used PSP at some point to keep as backup:)

Sony has a long track record of shooting themselves in the foot. In the days of mini-disc, it required you to encode the music in the Sony proprietary format onto minidisc. As a result, recording stuff to minidisc took a long time, a 5 minute song took 5 minutes to record. Sony digital cameras force you to use Memory Stick, which is much more expensive than standard SD cards. Oh, and a Sony DVD player will not let you play DVDs from other regions.

I love this site for this stuff. It's almost as if geeks believe in the legendary "informed consumer" who will act (en-masse in fact) to deny profit to companies that abuse him or her for their own ends. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Sony will continue to do just fine, and the people with technical/ethical problems with what they are doing will be swept under in a wave of apathy and "Oooh, shiny".

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Unless Sony gets its act together, it is destined to exit the hardware business and become a pure media conglomerate. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.

It took the Japanese 30 years to dominate the US Auto industry despite the fact that year in / year out they were delivering significantly better value to the consumer. It happened, but not overnight because big brands have a tremendous amount of momentum. It takes the combination of HUGE management

Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time.

With games, they arguably have a fair point.

With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both
DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.

People bought CDs of music they already had on vinyl or cassette or what-have-you because they had noticeably better
quality (don't give me that vinyl-beats-CD crap, which even if it did hold true on a virgin record, doesn't
once a diamond needle has ripped down all those those nice soft grooves). Once you talk about the same quality in
20 different physical formats, however, don't expect people to subsidize you for the rest of eternity rebuying your
existing library in incrementally better formats.

Not to start this same argument all over again, but the diamond needle only rips down all those those nice soft grooves if you have a cheap turntable with a 25 gram weight on that stylus. Earlier turntables and records were even worse; the old shellack platters wore out quickly. But I have decades-old LPs you would think were virgin, played on a 1/2 gram pressure.

If the title originally came out in analog, the LP will sound better than the CD (again, given a good enough turntable. One of digital's advantages is except for speakers, more money doesn't buy better sound). If it was originally mastered digitally, the CD will sound better than the LP.

Any time you mix analog with digital you get the worst of both worlds, with the advantages of neither. Many titles that originally were LP will have the CD sound better than the LP, because the LP was digitally mastered. Don't bother buying the LP version of any new music, because the new music will have been mastered digitally.

Their major blunder with the PSP/UMD was to redesign an existing concepot (the Minidisc) as the UMD to differentiate between the new shiny better one and the old.

Thing is, the Minidisc had a minor but loyal following, and in 2004 got a major upgrade with the Hi-MD format that allowed data and video to be trasnferred on top of music. And the major advantage of the format compared to the newfangled UMD was that it was rewritable.

If they had released the PSP with Minidisc games, videos and whatnot, I'm sure the console's story would have been completely different. Even with the Memory stick slot on the side. Both rewritable formats, and they'd have been SONY so presumably they wouldn't have lost anything. Of course that would have meant trusting the customers with an relatively open media, and that's something they're allergic to.

Instead they created the UMDs, closed and crippled them, and tried to sell them at the same price as full blown DVDs. No wonder it didn't take off. Meh.

Minidiscs are still extremely popular here in Japan. I don't really understand why, but virtually everybody I know has a minidisc system. I sometimes think Sony lives in a Japan-centric bubble. They make decisions based on what they can get away with in Japan (quite a lot) and figure it will work for the rest of the world. It really doesn't. Slowly, though, I see things changing. The high school students I teach here are moving away from Sony as far as I can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years Sony collapses based on their inability to see reality.

I found my old Minidisc recorder about two months ago. I'd had it since college, making it a decade old. The disc inside played flawlessly, the sound quality was as good as any mid-spec MP3 player (RAW audio, don't forget), and found a couple of albums for which the CDs were damaged.

My only issue with it is it now is extremely slow to copy music to compared to flash storage; It's audiostream recording.

I suspect the same dynamic. Sony as the Japanese Apple. Both groups willing to buy into the slavery/trendiness, and thus any questions as to why they do so make sense only when you consider the fan club aspect. Japanese probably wonder why Americans buy all those Apple products, not realizing the trend factor.Nihonjin: Did you see the Sony's new Box Thing? Awesome! Oh, what's that thing you got there, an iPod? Why would anyone buy one of those? I'd just buy Sony's new Box Thing.

They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.

This makes no sense.Think about it. Seriously, two-second consideration here. First, this is a platform based solely on downloadable games. If they have problems with piracy, especially rampant piracy cutting into game sales, it makes no sense to develop this platform. So either they have means to prevent it, or it doesn't m

So the PSP was such a good product that people where jailbreaking it and using it for all sorts of things (like playing movies), not just gaming. They were getting their games from independent sources and even playing PS1 games on it. They were playing movies directly from the memory stick without paying for Sony's overpriced movies.

Sony was selling the PSP at a loss and trying to make it up from overpriced games and overpriced movies. Since people were not buying as many games and movies from Sony as expected this wasn't working.

The old Sony (from 15 years ago) would've done the following:- Open up the console themselves so that people wouldn't need to jailbreak it- Pitch it as an open, portable multimedia + gaming device. Sell it for more money because people were buying it for the extra features.

The new Sony did the following:- Tried to patch the holes that allowed for the jailbreaking. These could only be patch with a new version of the console and new holes were discovered within a week of the old ones being patched. Consoles already out before the patch still had the old holes.- Came up with a completely new PSP with stronger DRM, such as having the firmware version tied to the games so that new games would force firmware upgrades thus closing existing holes in consoles with older firmware. The new PSP is NOT backwards compatible with the old one, adds no value for consumers (it actually reduces value) and costs more money.

Yet another situation where Sony shows how they went from a company that "was proud to do the best quality products and could sell them at a premium" to a Sony that "trades the quality-value that their brand name acquired in the past for pushing to consumers inferior products designed to have Sony get paid extra when users actually use their products".

This is why I stopped buying Sony altogether years ago (I distrust their products and expect them to, by design, force me to pay Sony extra money when use them) and never looked back.

The old sony has been dead for almost 20 years, I think the downfall came long before the memory stick and even the media buyout they did, the media division just enforced the shift which already was underway before.Remember the mini disk it came before sony bough the film division, it was dead on arrival due to sonys high pricing and the inability to have digital outs as well as their proprietary atrac codec.It could have replaced the aging floppy disks, but it did not. The 3.5 inch floppy disk was pretty

Putting an optical drive on a portable device didn't make sense, and Sony did the right thing to get rid of it (though a little too late). Load times for games are slow, discs can easily be scratched and (most importantly for a portable device) it kills the battery.

UMDs could easily be scratched because some genius at SONY R&D decided it would be a good idea to remove the protective sliding cover for whatever reason. Minidiscs have the same form-factor (with slightly cosmetic differences) and a protection over the opening for when the disc is not in use. Just like floppies. They are extremely robust and can last for years without any issue. My first MDs from 12 years ago still work like new.

So Sony released the PSP along with their UMD, repeating the same mistake Sony's made since BetaMax. UMDs only work on PSPs, therefore Sony will have the monopoly on the platform. Now it turns out that nobody likes UMDs, and they can be defeated by hacking the firmware and using another proprietary Sony format, MemoryStick, onto which people can load videos that they own.

So Sony decides to enclose completely the PSP. Hell, I'd be surprised if you even own the hardware.

... why did Sony not provide a UMD peripheral? Something that people could sync their existing UMD collection over to the new PSP device. Such a device (built into a charging dock for example) could copy the contents of an inserted game/movie disk over to the PSP which would be good to play for a few days before requiring a shorter validation resync.

It's madness no such device exists since without it (or a robust universal exchange program) Sony has just pissed off millions of potential customers. Who exactly is going to pay more money for a device that is essentially crippled? The only other way I can see a UMD-less working in the short term is if it were packed with phone functionality (and camera) and its cost was then subsidized by the phone networks.

The solution is simple: don't buy a PSP Go. There really aren't any technical reasons to buy a Go. The screen is smaller, it's harder to hold on to, the buttons are closer together, it has a mechanical slide that can fail, and it's more expensive. Not to mention that you can download and play games from PSN on a standard PSP.

I'd actually like a PSP Go since my PSP 1000 is a bit chunky. Fundamentally the device is cute, compact and technically sound. But I see no reason to upgrade while it costs so much and offers no upgrade path. It's no good buying a PSP if it can't play my PSP games. I'm certainly not buying them over again and don't particularly relish being locked into PSN for future purchases either.

The whole launch is a trainwreck with Sony simultaneously managing to piss off retailers and consumers. Maybe they'll addre

Actually it's your logic is flawed. If Nintendo had produced a DSi which arbitrarily used a different physical format for playing games and offered no backwards compatibility, or exchange / transfer program people would be annoyed. They would vote with their wallets and the thing would gather dust on the shelves. This is exactly what will happen with the PSP Go.

The simple fact is that Sony have produced a handheld PSP, an iteration of an existing design but chosen to leave 50 million or however many exist

I wonder if this isn't just a test to see how a device will do without physical media for the user. PS4 maybe 100% digital downloads? Sell one time use usb device to upload games to the device, then it shorts itself out, never to be used again? It will kill the second hand market for sure, but how will Wal-mart react?

The PS3 hasn't been broken because people had no reason to. You can easily install alternative operating systems on the thing. It's even mentioned in the manual. I think things will change though since they removed that option in the new PS3s. But maybe not as you can always find an old PS3 if you want to do homebrew.

... No, they removed the ability to install another OS with the latest hardware release. My old 60GB launch PS3 still allows me to install Linux if I so choose. With the PS3 slim, they didn't want to provide linux drivers for the new hardware (which would have added time and testing - and therefore a higher pricetag).

1) on a console where they are locked up tighter than a stereotypical tight-ass' asshole.

Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3. As DRM goes, I've seen a lot worse that what goes on at the Playstation Store, and I've rarely seen something better. Hopefully, Microsoft will see that this me

Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3.

It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even/. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".

It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even/. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".

No, that's the distinction. In Sony's (and the *AA's) eyes, you don't purchase content, you buy a license to use it in whatever ways they say you can. Since they lost the Fair Use battle, they are trying to change the game to something that favors them.

Logically, then, once a user has licensed a particular piece of content, that same piece of content should then be available to the user for each succeeding generation of media. Buy a movie on VHS, get the DVD five years later for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the Blu-Ray for only the cost of the media. Five years later, get the UberVideoHiRes digital download for only the cost of the bandwidth.

Actually, they allowed to use content you've purchased on devices you don't own. They also allow you use content you haven't purchased as long as it had been installed on one user account on your machine. I would personally prefer to simply have the game on a portable disc, but in lieu of that, the current system on the PS3 (excepting game saves) is something I can live with.

I'm aware that digital distribution essentially means that we are moving from concrete ownership of games to effectively licensing the

Piracy is rampant and easy on the PSP at present, but not everyone does it.

I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick. I hate having to carry the UMDs around, loading times improve and the battery life is better. I also have a genesis emulator on their and some ROMS of games I used to own as a kid. That may or may not be considered piracy I guess.

But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.

Regarding the "ease" of piracy on the PSP - this isn't true anymore. Recently, games have required higher versions of firmware than is possible to install on hacked PSP's. There are workarounds for this, but they're stop-gaps at best. It certainly isn't nearly as easy as it was a year ago.

I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.

Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.

I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick.... But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.

Moral right? You have already lost the moral argument by supporting Sony in the first place. "Ripping your games to MemStick"? Have you heard of this "Micro SD" that the rest of the industry uses? Sony is worse than every other company out there when it comes to promoting its own "standards" when there is already a perfectly good alternative, and until that changes I'll continue to recommend to everyone I know that they avoid Sony products completely.

Oddly, I don't care.

I mean, back in, like, 2000 or whatever, when I got my TRGPro, I thought it was dandy to be able to use the same 64MB compact flash card (Retail price at the time: $150) on both the handheld and my digital camera. Even through 2002 or 2003 with the early Tungsten devices, I felt that having the same memory card format on both my Palm and my camera was a very valuable thing, and I would share cards between devices. And for the longest time I thought hardware designs where micro-SD slots

Personally, I think all films should be made as puppet shows but with stunning plots.

The South Park guys tried that, although I don't know if you'd call their plot "stunning";) It did teach us one thing though: 99% of the human race can be lumped into one of three categories: dicks, assholes and pussies. The remaining 1% is actually made up of cockroaches from outer space.

I assume you're referring to "Team America: World Police", which was quite disappointing if you ask me... But the plot of the average South Park episode is WAY more stunning than what most people would expect from a construction paper cartoon that makes a lot of poop jokes...

I can't think why both of these are the #1 sellers by large margins in consoles and portables... It's certainly not the quality of titles.

Lolwut? The Wii sold almost entirely on stuff like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, neither of which is vulnerable to piracy and both reach out to many people who were not interested in gaming before. IF you're seriously going to argue that the DS has no good games I can only stare in disbelief.

Of course Nintendo has an entirely different attitude to selling consoles. While Sony and Microsoft treat the console as a loos leader, making their money mainly through game licenses, Nintendo sells their consoles at a profit, thus not being hurt quite as much by piracy (more pirates mean more console sales, after all).

OK, I know that anecdotal evidence really isn't acceptable, but based on the PSP owners I've talked to, I'm pretty sure I was the only person in North America who paid for PSP games. It was easily the most pirate friendly hand held console of it's generation.

No it was not patching the PSP still had a risk of bricking it, and the games are huge compared to the ones for the DS.The most pirate friendly console still is the DS.

But the issue is once you patched the PSP it became a killer handheld, the hardware behind really is excellent, but Sony had locked it down to such a degree in the beginning that it did not show.(Movies could not be played in full resolution, an online radio only was available after the homebrewers had one for almost a year, and PS1 games cou

OK, I know that anecdotal evidence really isn't acceptable, but based on the PSP owners I've talked to, I'm pretty sure I was the only person in North America who paid for PSP games. It was easily the most pirate friendly hand held console of it's generation.

Not really. The PSP needs to be reflashed with a custom firmware. This means either using some kind of flaw in a shipped game or needing a pandora battery and some software to create a magic memory stick. Oh and don't try this on a PSP-3000 or one with

Exactly! For the big companies it's not become about making a profit, but about squeezing every penny of profit out of the customer, and I think they hinder themselves by doing it. However, I'm no economist.

Actually, the biggest problem will be that all the "cool kids" will know why the PSP Go sucks, and you will look like the biggest tool this side of Sears Crafstman with one of these in your hands. (At least until it's somehow permanently cracked like the battery hack on the regular PSP.)

I'm going to start calling it the "PSP STOP" myself. And that's "stop" as in "door".